source file: mills2.txt
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 14:00:10 -0700

Subject: Re: Babies and tuning

From: "COUL%CLUSTR.decnet"@ezh.nl

I have delved up the contribution in Nature about the babies experiment:
Marcel R. Zentner & Jerome Kagan: Perception of music by infants,
Nature, vol. 383, 5 september 1996, p. 29.
It is a letter to the editor. Firstly the newpaper report I mentioned 
made the mistake of mixing up "dissonant" with "out of tune" (vals).
The experiment contains the playing of two different unfamiliar
melodies of 35-second duration in a consonant and a dissonant version
for a total of four trials to 32 infants. A computer program
controlled a synthesizer. The dissonant version of the melody was
composed in parallel minor seconds and the consonant version of
parallel thirds. The babies were carefully monitored and showed more
fixation to the consonant version. 
The conclusion was "Although less extreme forms of 
consonance/dissonance might be subject to cultural influence, we 
suggest that the human infant may possess a biological preparedness 
that makes consonance perceptually more attractive than dissonance."
They wrote further that "it has been argued repeatedly that
consonance judgements are acquired through exposure to the music of a 
particular culture", but that biological preparedness has never been
demonstrated. 
I think only two intervals are not a broad basis to talk about
consonance and dissonance in general so one might conclude from this
experiment more cautiously that babies prefer parallel thirds over
minor seconds. 

Manuel Op de Coul    coul@ezh.nl

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